And my sleeping patterns are already messed up. It’s 6am, and I haven’t actually been to bed yet. I had dinner at 3 in the morning while watching A Scanner Darkly, which I borrowed from Duncan. It’s not healthy, I tell you.

Defeated all the gang bosses on Crackdown, and even though a logical part of my brain knows that there’s still, in theory, quite a lot to do… the experience suddenly feels a lot emptier than it did. That’s the problem with sandbox-type freeform games; whilst in theory they can last forever, once you run off the end of the linear storyline that the developers have provided you with, the game suddenly stops making sense, your sense of immersion is shattered and the world feels just a little bit more hollow than it did.

Possibly it’s just the existential dilemma pervading the virtual world that we’ve entered to escape the real one – suddenly you realise the tasks which you are so diligently performing (like committing crime in GTA, stopping crime in Crackdown, doing whatever the heck you like in Oblivion) are absolutely without any meaning or higher purpose. You are simply performing them for the sake of performing them. Heck, worse on the Xbox 360 you find yourself doing boring shit just because you’re going to get an achievement for it that will sit in perpetuity upon your Xbox Live profile. I know I’m guilty of that!

At least I got out of halls today, even for a little bit. Quick walk down to the pub, which makes me once more appreciate the brilliance of the British institution which is the pub. Although it’s worrying when you start recognising some of the regulars, like this guy with the most awesome muttonchops I have possibly ever seen. They were astonishing.